Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @05:06AM
from the every-greenspunned-program-eventually-sprouts-emacs dept.

mpicpp (3454017) writes with word that Mozilla released a full development environment integrated into Firefox (available now in nightly builds). From the announcement:
Developers tell us that they are not sure how to start app development on the Web, with so many different tools and templates that they need to download from a variety of different sources. We’re solving that problem with WebIDE, built directly into Firefox. Instead of starting from zero we provide you with a functioning blueprint app with the click of a button. You then have all the tools you need to start creating your own app based on a solid foundation. WebIDE helps you create, edit, and test a new Web application right from your browser. It lets you install and test apps on Firefox OS devices and simulators and integrates the Firefox Developer Tools for seamless debugging and inspection across those devices. This is a first step towards debugging across various platforms and devices over WiFi using open remote debugging APIs.
The default editor is based on CodeMirror, but the protocol for interacting with the IDE is open and support for other editors (Emacs anyone?) should appear soon.

Even dumber people will now be able to call themselves "Web Developers."

That's a dumb remark. That's like calling people "dumb" because they can call themselves "programmers" because they use a compiler like C or C++ or Clojure or Lisp, etc. instead of coding in an assembly language!!

I don't think that applies given that the IDE is for the web, not the browser. This is more like a digital photo frame shipping with a photo editing package. Which is kind of worse, because at least the inner platform ships users the tools they need to make the product itself better.

FWIW, Mozilla Seamonkey, which is more directly descended from Netscape Communicator than Firefox, still has "Edit Page" in the File menu with a freaking accelerator key attached to it. Because so many people are constantly editing pages in their web browser that it needs to be a keystroke away. (I'm pretty sure most web servers would refuse to do anything with the "edited" page.) 99.999% of the time it's used is probably when someone meant to hit control-W to close a tab.

I probably use firebug at least once a month to delete a random misbehaving element or otherwise "fix" a broken 3rd party webpage I am trying to view.I use it constantly for work but it's suprising how often I find it useful for making a 3rd party website more usable.

They've already changed the UI three or four times since 3.x, it's time for them to branch out. Naturally Seamonkey's "Edit Page" (does anyone really use that?) would be the lowest hanging fruit to start with and blow up to ten times its original bloat. Still, I think what they are doing is at least potentially useful, unlike Edit Page.

So the WebIDE is bundled into every download of FF, but at same time they are moving every single feature a normal browser user uses into extensions or at most, into "about:config" -ui?!! I now have a one extension which provides the "hide tabs when one tab is open" -functionality, another to move tabs below the address-bar and to hide the other Australis-crap. Likely there will be need for yet another extension on FF 31, but the dev tools used by ~0,000001% of the FF userbase are always included. Great.

I sort of thought that a large portion of the development features (debugger, inspector, profiler etc.) has already been there for some time? The incremental cost of adding CodeMirror and fleshing it out a bit surely can't be that huge.

You picked up a very bad example. It is perfectly possible to make very good applications using VB6 when you know what you're doing, and the same goes for any other programming language. But when you have a "script kiddie developer", he will make trash code in any language.

Especially when all they're used to do is just load dozens of libraries to use a handful of functions from each one. That's how we get a Web version of "Hello World" that requires three megabytes of download.

Much as I hate VBCode, the old VB IDE was actually fairly nice for designing simple interfaces. If I could find something similar to make useful applications in a cross-platform manner, I'd be happy to use it. I think the closest might be the Netbeans IDE, but that's still somewhat of a PITA compared to the old VB'ish interface.

I miss too. Okay, VB is bad to deal with threads (is possible, just not simple), is slow compared to C and have several other small defects. But having said that, so far I have not seen a better IDE to build simple and complex graphical interfaces, I had easy access to COM/ActiveX objects and if I really needed, is reasonably simple to deal directly with the Win32 API.

Are you sure? Because I'd swear that all the stuff they have been removing lately is stuff related to it being a browser. You know, all the things that we get told we need to install an ad-on for. And of course we already know that the next version is going to break that ad-on once again.

Firefox, the development environment. With the option to install a bunch of ad-ons that turns it into a browser.

Right now this protocol is useful for Firefox Desktop, Firefox Android, and Firefox OS. But we aren’t stopping there. We’re working on a protocol adapter that will allow clients using the Firefox Remote Debugging Protocol – including the Developer Tools and WebIDE – talk to all mobile browsers, regardless of rendering engine or runtime. Our first targets are Chrome for Android and Safari on iOS.

That's long gone. The download (29MB for win32) is now larger than Seamonkey (20MB). At least half the development is focused on mobile and other projects. Thunderbird and Seamonkey have no paid developers. I assume the mobile products do have to be lean and fast though. That's been the big turnaround in browsers, back to small screens, low memory and slow chips!

As for desktop. Still a good browser, needs one process per tab. Still good to have a compliant rendering engine besides Chrome. Still good to have

lean has not been the goal of firefox for a long time, if you need a browser to run on your windows 95 potato, try "off by one browser" it's a ~2 megabyte install including SSL or 1.2 M without SSL, it requires about 5-10 megabytes of ram per tab depending on page size

Mozilla.org is very quickly expanding Firefox to becoming Mozilla II. Remember when the suite was split apart into its various components, leaving Firefox a very lightweight-but-extensible browser, and Thunderbird a lean and mean yet also expandable email client, and if you still wanted the monolithic build you downloaded Mozilla instead?

Not any more. Firefox is very quickly edging its way toward becoming a heavyweight web development suite again. I think if users want that, they will either install the Web Developer extension or maybe just go straight to installing the Mozilla suite. Why are they "bloating" Firefox again instead of making the IDE an optional add-on via extensions?

It's because now, they have money. When firefox was first broken out, Mozilla was a slow, lumbering, and most importantly very lean company. They didn't have a lot of money or credibility. Firefox came out, became the darling and revenue started to flow in from the search bar, ads, donations, etc. Then they had money, and when you have money that needs spending you look for things to do. Then you end up creating FirefoxOS, webIDE, etc, etc because in big strategy meetings about what to do with this mon

How does that justify taking functionality - that was already there and working fine- away? How does it justify changing things just for the sake of changing them?

Stop and ask yourself this question: "What's the problem that I'm trying to solve?" If you can't answer that, or the best you can come up with is "it's the wrong colour" then it's probably best to leave it the fuck alone.

There are many arguments against adding the IDE, but I don't agree with this one. People said the same thing when Google came out with Gmail. "We've already got hotmail and yahoo and a million other free email services. Why do we need another?" If this tool is good enough or simple enough to use that it becomes ubiquitous, then it doesn't matter what's already out there.

Stop. please. we tried this 20 years ago with ActiveX and it turned out to be a flaming turd that myred an entire generation in code that could only run in IE and only specific versions that supported different activeX framework.

Developers tell us that they are not sure how to start app development on the Web, with so many different tools and templates that they need to download from a variety of different sources.

I know it can be a bit overwhelming at first, but this icky feeling is called choice. things can be unique and different and thats okay, so long as they work in chrome and firefox and adhere to good coding practices like not exploiting specific browser quirks to achieve something

Read the article, they are targeting Firefox, Chrome and Safari as platforms. This is a development tool for some reason put into core.

And the "app" does have to be a web app because this is all about mobile. They will probably integrate submitting the app to the various vendor-approved marketplaces, starting with this one: https://marketplace.firefox.co... [firefox.com]

I question all this, because Mozilla has limited resources, mainly from Google searches. But sticking with Desktop only would be risky.

You gotta start from somewhere. In the 90s if you did not know bettter (and likely had no internet access) you ended up playing with QBASIC, old Visual Basic and such. And fuck, yes a "webapp" is confusing, what with needing to learn like five language to create simple crap (PHP [or other], Javascript, HTML, CSS and whatever, not to mention the kilometer long config file if you install Apache)Add paying for a server and a domain name.. that shit costs recurrent cash to pay by debit card or paypal? Fuck it.O

I think we would all agree that code bloat goes beyond web browsers, it's a problem for every piece of software, a problem from the future, waiting to happen, somewhere there along the development timeline, when someone with insufficient life wisdom decides for yet another feature, and as features become less related to the core functionality of the original product, the code bloat becomes more of a nuisance.

Since the psychology of developers can hardly be changed fast, especially the inexperienced ones (wisdom does not equal competency here - you can contribute to libevent, but not have a clue about the kind of wisdom I am talking about), I think another solution is necessary.

This solution is to at least try to decouple the features from the core product in such a way that these do not impair loading and runtime times, can be distributed/added/removed separately and generally do not impact the core product. Dynamic library loading, etc - all these things can be used with good measure to combat perceived bloat. But we still need to educate each other on these things.

The good and related principle of high-cohesion low-coupling should also be applied.

My point is, in itself, a gazillion addons is not a problem, as long as a person not wanting one single addon can use the product to their satisfaction where mere existence of plugin/addon/dev-IDE system does not impact his experience negatively. And it shouldn't - if you can load libraries on demand, you can decouple the IDE from Firefox, so that people who never heard of it or do not want it, can live in blissful ignorance of its mere existence.

Then I just hope they don't bundle it with Firefox, so that people who just want the [simple] browser, do not have to download code their computer will probably never run. And if it does, it can download on demand, since it is an addon, just like the rest of them.

Anyone remember Netscape Gold? How long will we have to wait for email client, news reader, and Kitchen Sink(tm) to be bundled back in?

So much for a lightweight browser and codebase (Firefox has already marched past that line in the sand, but this is a monumental increase to the marching speed) Not to mention the potential security implications for managed desktops.

Anyone remember Netscape Gold? How long will we have to wait for email client, news reader, and Kitchen Sink(tm) to be bundled back in?

So much for a lightweight browser and codebase (Firefox has already marched past that line in the sand, but this is a monumental increase to the marching speed) Not to mention the potential security implications for managed desktops.

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

A sleek, once-efficient browser has now been turned into a bloated platform for for IDE hosting. Why would anyone want to use such a mess for such a critical part of their development infrastructure, especially in light of the continuing whimsical and frequent changes to the look, feel and operation of the FireFox UI by out of touch developers.

Firstly, Mozilla's business model is not my problem. It was their decision to give out Firefox for free.

Secondly, if Mozilla apparently wants people to use their browser, they should be thanking me for pointing out how to make it more popular. If they don't, they're on the right track [wikipedia.org]. Not my problem, though.

Thirdly, there are alternatives. So far I still have a slight preference for FF, but my usage of Chrome is rising and even IE11 is proving

I mean, on this site people used to rant that in good old days every computer user was a programmer or at the very least had easy access to programming tools (by e.g. turning the computer on), such as Commodore 64 with all its PEEKs and POKEs (thick paper manual included), or how you would write an assembler from machine language when you didn't run out of bits, Hypercard on the Macintosh, the oft ridiculed Qbasic, and other examples.

Some of these were good, some of these sucked but at least noobs and unsup